Herb Score's voice was a whisper the last time I saw him. He needed a walker to get around. His legs were a mosaic of bruises and blotches.

"I'm lucky," he said that July day in 2006, a week before he would make his final public appearance at Jacobs Field.

He didn't mean lucky to have had a brilliant-if-brief major-league career or lucky for 34 years in the Indians' broadcast booth. Or lucky for the coming induction in the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame with his great friend and old roommate, Rocky Colavito.

He glanced toward the door where his wife, Nancy, was greeting a visitor.

"Lucky to have Nancy?" I asked.

He nodded.

Robyn Layton Kinsley/Plain Dealer FileHerb Score, at the Indians' opener at Cleveland Municipal Stadium on April 5, 1993, was a beloved Tribe broadcaster for 34 years.

Herb Score's strength was his faith and family, for sure. But it was also his vision. He never looked back, especially not to ask, "Why me?" during a difficult, sometimes hellish, final decade of his life.

The man who symbolized Indians baseball for so many years when everything else about the team changed except its record of futility died at home early Tuesday with his wife and family at his side. He was 75.

"A great example of how to live your life," Tom Hamilton said Tuesday of his friend and former broadcast partner. "When I think of how he treated me -- I mean here was this baseball icon stuck with this dumb farm boy from Wisconsin -- and he made me feel comfortable from Day 1. . . . For 30 years, he was the best thing about Indians baseball."

Score never saw it that way. He didn't understand why showing up every day to do your job was such a big deal, particularly his job.

"I don't look upon this as work," he said when he announced in 1997 that he would retire after the season.

It's why the first spring training game he announced hardly sounded different than the last game he did, the crushing Game¤7 loss to the Marlins in the '97 World Series.

He did his first TV game in 1964, moved to radio in 1968, missed one -- one -- game between then and 1994 when the passing of his daughter, Susan, forced his absence from the booth. His motto: Fans should remember what happened in the game, not what he said.

"It was never about him," said Hamilton. "And in our business, that's quite an exception."

Remembering the game and not something Score said wasn't always cut and dried. There were so many nondescript games until the Indians changed the culture of a city beginning in 1994. And, well, he had his memorable broadcast moments, too.

His bloopers became terms of endearment with fans, in a sense strengthening his connection with listeners. With Score, it was easy to forgive a botched call -- "Is it fair? Is it foul? It is!"

So many players came and went. Referring to Indians reliever Efrain Valdez one time as Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (the star of the TV show "The F.B.I."), well, you try keeping them all straight.

The even-keeled Score and the emotional Hamilton made perfect partners for eight seasons. Everyone, Hamilton included, was rooting for Score as the magic of the 1997 postseason unfolded. He deserved to see a World Series champ. The Indians would return a contender in 1998, no matter what happened. Score would not be back.

"The only time I saw a different Herb was when Tony Fernandez hit that home run against Baltimore," Hamilton said of the 11th-inning home run in the '97 ALCS. "Herb got up out of his chair when he made that call. You knew then how much that must've meant."

Listeners didn't see that. But they heard it in Score's voice when he said, "The Indians are going to the World Series." And they couldn't possibly have minded the pause and the clarification that was necessary since the Orioles had one final at-bat remaining: "Maybe."

They did go. And when that trip ended in disappointment, Score didn't show his. Just like always, he ended his part of the final broadcast by throwing it to Hamilton for the postgame wrapup.

That was that. No sappy remembrances. No suggestion that he had left any bigger tracks behind as an intimate guest in the living room of Indians fans for three decades than a summer temp might've.

We know the difference even if he didn't. Hamilton says he doesn't believe Score ever really understood how much people respected him and adored him. A generation of Indians fans knew him as one of the greatest pitching talents in baseball history, the American League Rookie of the Year in 1955 whose rookie strikeout mark (245) stood until the New York Mets' Dwight Gooden came along in 1984.

The affection came in part from seeing his career viciously interrupted by the line drive off the bat of the New York Yankees' Gil McDougald in 1957 that nearly blinded Score. But it also stemmed from how he never wallowed in self-pity. Not then. Not after a car accident that nearly killed him in 1998.

The last decade of his life was filled with unrelenting challenges.

The accident. A stroke. Surgery. Staph infection. A bout with pneumonia. And the extended hospital stay that preceded his death Tuesday. It was difficult to watch for those who loved him, and everyone who knew him loved him.

Even those who knew the voice better than they knew the man appreciated his understated class and his knowledge of the game.

In 1995, when the Indians were clearly ending decades of ineptitude with a truly special season, legendary Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell said, "Herb deserves this."

"I don't deserve it," Score said when told of Harwell's words. "The city deserves it."

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